Strategery was always one of our very favorite games in the early days of iOS. And by “we,” I mean large portions of the staff at Macworld, including both myself and Lex Friedman. Lex reviewed the app for Macworld, and we even gave it an award. It was a Hall of Fame iPhone game.

Strategery—named for Will Ferrell’s made-up word during his impression of George W. Bush—was a take on the classic strategy board game Risk. Risk is a clunky game to play, with an awful lot of little plastic pieces and dice rolling. Strategery did away with that, resolving battles with a single tap while replacing the map-inspired board with a series of procedurally generated game terrains. It was really great.

Now the bad news: The classic Strategery game, which hasn’t been updated for nearly a decade, doesn’t work on iOS 27, which (if you hadn’t noticed) came out today. I hate it when beloved software dies. And so does Lex, which is why he sprang into action and began building a game that could be a suitable Strategery replacement. (It was very good! I have played it a bunch over the last few weeks, via TestFlight.)

But then something delightful happened, as Lex recounts:

I loved Strategery. I didn’t feel good about knocking it off. So I reached out to the developers…. I had several delightful video conversations with Sumul and Courtland. And I lucked out: I found two of the nicest developers you could ever hope to meet. They still felt a ton of love for Strategery, they loved how many people still felt warmly about the game — but they didn’t have time to devote to keeping it updated. We worked out a deal for me to take it on.

The result is that Lex’s game inspired by Strategery has become Strategery! Existing Strategery users will just get it as a free update. And new players can buy it for $5.

Lex has added a few new features to Strategery, and with the consultation of the original developers, he’s restored some features he hadn’t even realized that he had missed.

What a happy ending. Strategery would always have a place in App Valhalla, but it’s even better if it remains alive and well. Thanks, Lex.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Last year’s macOS release, macOS 26 Tahoe, was a mixed bag. While it added a bunch of solid new productivity features, it also included a half-baked visual update that muddied the entire interface. While I chose to view the glass as half full and accepted the interface imperfections, I understand that a lot of people just gave Tahoe a pass rather than inflict a visual regression on themselves.

No matter how full you think the (liquid) glass was, I have good news: macOS 27 Golden Gate is here, and it’s good. Not only has Apple addressed most of the visual problems with last year’s release, but if you skipped Tahoe, you’re also going to be dazzled by Tahoe features like Apple’s first native clipboard history, Shortcuts automation and AI access, and an improved Spotlight.

For everyone who spent a year grinding in Tahoe, Golden Gate doesn’t just improve the look of the entire system, but offers a host of other improvements. This is an update nobody will have to apologize for liking.

Design takes a step forward

The fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe design decisions were. Apple describes the design as “even more refined,” because in Apple marketing-speak, broken features are never remedied or fixed—past features are just improved. The truth is, Apple has rolled back numerous missteps and made changes to others to mitigate the issues they caused.

Floating glass sidebars inset from window edges—a choice that made sense metaphorically, but looked awful—are gone, essentially reverted to their previous design, sitting at the left edge of windows, with a darker background for contrast and colored icons to boot.

Toolbars, one of the most important interface conventions of macOS, were flattened and ghostly in Tahoe. In Golden Gate, they pick up better shading and are more legible, though (strangely) the toolbar in inactive windows offers more contrast and legibility than in active ones! In Photos, toolbars are actual bars, not horizontal areas of floating glassy buttons—which means the system no longer has to attempt to add shading behind those areas in order to improve legibility. They’re just legible.

In Golden Gate, windows generally just feel… a bit more square. Apple has made window corners more consistent, and not having the curved corners of the sidebar right inside the curved corners of the window edge also helps make it feel a little less like you’re under the tyrannical rule of the Circle King.

Icons look better across the board in Golden Gate, probably because of a new layered icon compositing approach Apple is taking across its platforms. Unfortunately, apps that dare stick any of their extremities out of the mandated squircle shape are still put in a featureless gray box of shame, which makes it harder to identify icons, especially in appearance modes like Clear and Tinted that remove color as an identifier.

The iconic macOS “stoplight” window controls have even gotten a bit of a glow-up, with some Liquid Glass shading added to the three circles in the top left of windows. I think they’re cute. Not only are they more harmonious with the other Liquid Glass design elements in macOS (and all of Apple’s current operating systems), but they also hearken back to the classic Aqua design language that was introduced along with Mac OS X back in the day. I don’t know if I want to lick these stoplight icons, but they do look a little candy-like, and I’m here for it.

To hear Apple tell it, users are split on the transparency effect of Liquid Glass: some people despise it, and some people can’t get enough of it. As a result, all of Apple’s OS 27 updates introduce a slider—it’s in the Appearances pane of Settings on macOS—that lets you customize the transparency from sort-of-mostly-transparent to sort-of-mostly-opaque. Given that this update rolls back a lot of Apple’s decisions from a year ago, I’m inclined to believe that there really are two camps when it comes to Liquid Glass. Giving users an option to adjust the setting is fine—I think in the end I will adjust it just to the opaque side of center.

Siri AI takes the Spotlight

Siri has been a part of the Mac experience for a decade now, arriving on the platform five years after it debuted on the iPhone. While I’m sure that many Mac users have embraced it over the years, it has always been an afterthought at best for me. When I’m sitting at my Mac, I’ve got a keyboard and trackpad to get my job done, so I don’t generally feel the need to talk to my computer. And while you’ve been able to type to Siri for a while now… well, the other problem with Siri has always been that Siri’s results are rarely as useful as the results of typing those words into a search engine or some other tool.

In macOS Golden Gate, as with all the other OS 27-era releases, Apple has upgraded Siri to become Siri AI, with LLM-derived features that promise much better results. On top of that, Apple has finally done what it should have done long ago and merged Siri and Spotlight, so there are no longer two separate “type to find things” interfaces on the platform.

Apple is labeling this feature as a beta within macOS 27.0, though I’m of the opinion that if you ship a feature in your “final” OS version, it’s fair to judge it. Fortunately for Apple, Siri AI actually works quite well. In terms of general-knowledge queries, it’s very good—good enough that if you previously relied on Google Gemini or ChatGPT for basic questions, you probably can just use Siri and be happy.

But part of the appeal of Siri AI is its integration with your personal on-device data. And here, the results are encouraging—but a bit of a work in progress. Siri AI takes advantage of an updated Spotlight index to search files on your Mac, including data in apps such as Mail and Calendar. I found that asking targeted questions can generate good responses, but you need to be aware of the system’s limitations. Some third-party apps aren’t tied into the Spotlight index, and if there isn’t local searchable data (for example, if you use Gmail and aren’t using Apple Mail) you just can’t search that data at all. I ended up setting up Apple’s Calendar and Mail apps on my Mac, even though I use Fantastical and Mimestream for those purposes, just so I could be sure Spotlight and Siri could search through my calendar items and mail.

Still, there are some magic moments to be had. I asked Siri what episodes I should be watching next for the “Magnum, p.i.” podcast I do with friends—yes, I have my finger on the pulse of today’s culture—and it managed to make an intelligent search of my Messages archive and pull out the relevant message that I sent to the group listing what our next episodes were. That felt like magic. It doesn’t happen like that every time—there’s a lot of “here are a bunch of PDFs that might work, good luck”—but it’s all quite promising.

There’s a new Ask Siri entry that’s been added to the top of every contextual menu, and while I don’t mind the idea that Siri can act on just about any context you can think of on the Mac, I don’t love how it’s implemented. It’s at the top of every single context menu (regardless of applicability) and darker than the rest of the menu. If you click on it, it floats forward, the rest of the menu disappears, and you can type in the resulting box. I don’t mind the impulse, but it feels like Apple is trying too hard to push Ask Siri into places it doesn’t belong.

And I don’t want to soft-pedal the Spotlight improvements, even though they were obviously made to benefit Siri AI. Spotlight is also better in Golden Gate, all around. Suggestions are better, and if you use Apple Mail you will find the search function there much improved. Sometimes upgrades made to benefit AI can benefit regular humans, too!

Touchscreen Macs, at last?

One of the most remarkable features of macOS Golden Gate does not really make sense if you take it at face value: Apple has given a major upgrade to Sidecar, the feature introduced in 2019 that allows Macs to use iPads as external Mac displays. As someone who always travels with a 13-inch iPad Pro, that’s a nice feature, though since the 2022 introduction of Universal Control, which lets me use my Mac’s keyboard and mouse on an iPad still running iPadOS, I’ve found very little use for Sidecar.

The big update is that Sidecar, which previously only supported the Apple Pencil, now works with the iPad’s touchscreen. Apple has updated its own apps and supplied third-party apps with the appropriate tools to support full touchscreen support. You can now scroll Mac browser windows with a finger and drag windows around on screen… but only on that iPad you’re using as an extra display.

It’s not hard to read between the lines: As numerous reports have suggested, Apple is planning on releasing its first touch-enabled MacBooks late this year or early next year. Using Sidecar as a way to demo the technology and allow developers to test their apps in advance is really clever.

Beyond that, this feature is delightfully boring. It just does more or less what you’d expect. Adding touch to macOS isn’t going to be revolutionary—it’s been on Windows for ages, and iPads have had optional trackpads and keyboards for six years now. But it’ll be a nice incremental benefit. I still use touch gestures when I’m working on an iPad in laptop configuration, because sometimes it just makes ergonomic sense. If my hands aren’t on the keyboard and I need to scroll something or tap something, a quick poke with my finger does the job. It feels natural—and once you’ve spent some time with that configuration, it’s jarring to use a Mac laptop and realize that you’re poking the screen to no effect.

After a moment’s glee in being able to scroll a Finder window with my finger, using Sidecar with touch to drive the Mac interface just became… normal. Apple has done a good job implementing the feature. Menus drop down reliably. Buttons are tappable. Scrolling works. There’s just not a lot to report, and that’s just fine. It works.

Shortcuts, reduced and enhanced

The Shortcuts app, the cornerstone of Apple’s cross-platform automation technologies, gets a notable upgrade during this cycle. Most of it is probably due to the needs of Describe a Shortcut, a remarkable new feature that lets you input some text and then watch as your device converts it into a Shortcut.

It is, in some ways, a longstanding dream of the computer industry finally realized. You can literally describe what you want your device to do—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it.

Describe a Shortcut is limited—Shortcuts of great complexity are beyond its ken, as are ones that use actions from third-party apps—but when it works, it’s magical.

Perhaps its best feature is that you can iterate on your Shortcuts. If there’s something it doesn’t do quite right the first time, you can specify changes you’d like to see—”only show me items from my Personal calendar”—and it’ll rewrite the Shortcut to take those changes into account. In that way, it’s emulating the back-and-forth conversations that can make vibe coding so remarkable.

For those of us still building Shortcuts with our own fingers like animals, some of the other improvements will help that work get done. There’s a new Otherwise If statement that can be added to If-Else blocks (you get to it by control-clicking on the Else block and then choosing Add “Otherwise If”), making the structuring of branching shortcuts logic much, much simpler.

There’s also support for persistent data storage, which is kind of huge. You can save data, which syncs via iCloud and is accessible across your devices, and Shortcuts can both access it and update it! That will make Shortcuts capable of behaving more like other apps, all without having to rig up other ways of storing data in iCloud Drive or elsewhere. (Yes, this canonizes Simon Støvring’s Data Jar in Apple’s OS, and that’s a good thing.)

The arrival of Describe a Shortcut has changed the Shortcuts interface a bit. On the Mac, there’s a new three-paned interface, where the third pane is a giant preview of a shortcut’s color, icon, and (this is fun) an AI-generated summary of what the shortcut does. The pane exists because of the text box at the bottom, which lets you type input to Describe a Shortcut to make changes to whatever shortcut you’ve got selected. Fortunately, it’s easy to resize or hide that pane and go back to the more standard Shortcuts look.

New horizons for Photos

There are a bunch of big changes in Photos this year, but the three biggest ones are driven by AI. And they’re a bit of a mixed bag.

Clean Up, which removes unwanted items from the background of photos, has been improved a lot. The new version is much more adept at artfully clipping unwanted items out of an image and filling those areas with in-context backgrounds.

The other two features, Extend and Spatial Reframe, require the use of an advanced diffusion model that’s only available via Private Cloud Compute, and as a result, they take time to execute, since Photos will need to upload your photo, wait for a result, and then download the result.

Extend feels like a good feature, since there are plenty of scenarios where your image needs just a little more headroom or width. However, every pixel you expand the selection increases the jeopardy that what’s going to be generated is weird or fake. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I found that I was much more comfortable expanding a photo a little bit to gain some headroom than doing it a lot, forcing the AI system to invent more objects or scenes. I was occasionally frustrated that I couldn’t slightly extend the bottom of some images, where subjects’ legs or feet were cut off. Also, you have to be aware of incredible fabrications—extending a graduation photo added a gigantic floating tassel and an invented piece of furniture, and extending a stadium shot added a roof where there isn’t one. Judicious use, carefully analyzed, is my advice.

Then there’s Spatial Reframe, which brings together a load of existing Apple technologies, including the spatial scanning algorithm it used to create spatial photos on Vision Pro. This feature works by scanning your photo locally using that algorithm, inferring a depth map that is then used to build a 3-D version of the image that you can pivot a bit, up and down, and left and right. This is the effect that allows you, on the Vision Pro, to feel like you can move your head and see parallaxes shifting, even though, if you look closely, the exposed content behind a subject is just a simple generative fill. It all happens so quickly, and in service of a live 3-D effect, that it’s often not noticeable, and even when it is, it’s not that big a deal.

The bar is a lot higher for a fixed, 2-D photo at full resolution. So after you use Spatial Reframe to slightly move the perspective of a shot, all the data is sent up to Private Cloud Compute, where a new version of your shot is rendered—including much more advanced generation of all of those pixels that are revealed by parallax or at the edges of the frame.

Some results are more synthetic than others. Unlike Extend, Spatial Reframe changes the entire perspective of the picture, which requires everything visible to be re-rendered at full quality. The result sometimes feels artificial. Again, my first impression is for people to use this feature with care and caution.

Apple has finally updated its Shared Albums feature, which had been compromised since it launched because it didn’t offer the ability to share full-resolution images. Over the years, Apple added other methods of sharing groups of photos via iCloud, and those could include full-resolution images, but this one prominent feature felt stuck in the past.

Now it’s getting a proper upgrade, with support for full-resolution images and allowing for full collaboration with people on other platforms so that everyone can contribute to a shared photo album. I’m relieved that I will soon have to stop explaining the differences among the various ways to share items in Photos and warning people away from Shared Albums.

There are a handful of other nice, new Photos features, including new Captured By Me and Identity Documents sections (quick, find that photo of my passport!), and a triumphant return of star ratings for individual photos if you are the sort of person who wants to assign star ratings to things.

Safari gets organized

Across the 27 OS releases, Safari now sports an AI-driven tab organizer, so if you’re someone who keeps a zillion tabs open, you can have Safari group them into smaller, more navigable clusters. I’m not a zillion-tabs person, so I basically haven’t used this feature. I’m glad it’s there for those who are desperately in need of an injection of tab organization, though.

There’s also a new Notify Me feature that will send you a message if a webpage you’re watching changes. You can specify what kinds of changes you’re looking for using natural language, and it’ll check every hour, day, week, or month. Personally I don’t think I would ever use this feature for anything—nothing has occurred to me in the months I’ve been using the Golden Gate betas!—but if you’re someone who has a seldom-updated site you’re monitoring, maybe something involving a local government or school, I could see it being useful.

What I have found useful, however, is Safari’s exciting new Describe Extension feature. This is essentially “vibe coding” of Safari extensions. The process is fairly simple, kicked off by clicking on the utility icon to the far left of the URL bar and choosing Describe Extension. It works exactly that way: You type out what you want the extension to do, and it’ll build it for you—but first, it’ll also search the App Store to see if there are available Safari extensions that already solve the problem.

If you’re thinking that you don’t know what you’d use this feature for, I get it. But over the summer, I ran into two instances where I was frustrated by what a website was doing, and ended up using Describe Extension to solve my problem. It was extremely satisfying.

I use StrawPoll.com to schedule podcast recording, but the site has two separate scheduling features: Create Poll and Schedule Meeting. Both of them are, of course, tools to create a poll that schedules a meeting. I never remember which one to click on. So I had Safari build me an extension for that website that hides Create Poll from the site’s navigation bar, and redirects all attempts to load the Create Poll page to the Schedule Meeting page instead. It works!

There’s also the Relay podcast networks title-voting page, which offers an archive so I can look back on title suggestions for other shows—but that link appears nowhere in the site’s interface, so I’m always trying to look it up or guess what it is. I had Safari add a link to the page’s nav bar so I never need to look it up again.

When you update to Golden Gate, keep an eye out. There are lots of opportunities for simple customizations to websites you use, once you realize you have the power to describe an extension.

This section is running in the background

In Golden Gate, the Dock now continues to display apps that haven’t quite quit, but are continuing to run in the background, with a note attached to their contextual menu that they are “running in the background” and an option to stop that background processing.

I understand why this might be useful in some circumstances. You might want to know that the app you “quit” is still hanging around. In practice, though, this is entirely contrary to how the Dock is supposed to operate.

The Dock is not a notification board for Apple’s privacy and security systems to warn us about apps doing weird things. It’s a launcher and monitor of apps that are providing a user interface. It’s never been a place to display background apps, and it shouldn’t start being one now.

On top of that, I just can’t figure out why some apps appear in the Dock in this state and some don’t. I understand an app like Photoshop, that sometimes keeps running for a little while after you quit it, being flagged in the Dock until it’s properly quit. (Which it already did, for the record.) I don’t understand fully quitting an app like Shortcuts and having it just sit in the Dock as if it were still running. Is the app misbehaving? Is this a bug? I’m baffled about this choice all the way around.

Wait, there’s more…

There are so many small enhancements in Golden Gate that it’s hard to mention them all, and every time I turn around, I keep bumping into more of them.

• Apple has added some light menu-bar management, specifically to deal with items that overflow the notch on some MacBook models. I’m glad that it’s taken this tentative step, though I wish it were more—it’s okay, Apple, you can sherlock all those menu-bar-management utilities out there—and of course, it should’ve happened back when the notch first appeared (checks notes) three years ago. Better late than never, I guess.

• Both Finder and the document save option in the menu bar will scan the contents of a file and offer up naming suggestions. I didn’t love the suggestions it offered, but your mileage may vary. I’d like to see this feature applied to auto-generated filenames like screenshots, though!

• In June, Apple introduced a feature that injected some agentic AI into the Passwords app, so that the app could automatically change your compromised or easy-to-guess passwords for you. When I tried it, it had about a 8% success rate—not great! Apple has pulled this feature from the first version of Golden Gate, hopefully to make it much better, and will re-introduce it later this year.

• Notes has gotten way more Markdown savvy. You could already import Markdown text format into Notes, but now you can go the other way, copying or pasting the contents of styled notes text as Markdown. As someone who writes everywhere in Markdown, this is a great feature.

Sail through the Golden Gate

The Golden Gate is one of California’s crown jewels, where San Francisco and Marin stand apart and allow the Pacific Ocean to mingle with the San Francisco Bay and the vast river deltas of the Central Valley. And for 89 years it’s been spanned by one of the most recognizable structures in the world.

It’s a lot to live up to. And while macOS 27 can’t possibly do that, it does manage to be a very good update that rectifies macOS 26 Tahoe’s greatest sins, unifies a more useful Siri with Spotlight, and hints at some subtle ways Apple can use on-device models to make using your computer more productive.

Tahoe users will find the entire Mac experience more attractive and cohesive. Those who stuck with macOS 15 Sequoia¹ will pick up those improvements as well as Tahoe’s raft of productivity boosts.

I live about six miles north of the Golden Gate. It’s nice here. And for the next year, It’ll be nice to have the company of a macOS version. Fortunately, it’s shaping up to be a good neighbor that’s focused on beautifying the neighborhood.

My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.

With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best ad and tracker blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.

And with the new Apple TV Ad Blocking feature in v5.1, it extends the powerful Safari, YouTube and App ad blocking protection to your Apple TV; allowing you to:

• Block ads in your favourite streaming apps
• Stop hidden in-app trackers
• Speed up your internet
• See what has been blocked

So, join the community of over 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.

In his first event video since taking over as Apple CEO, John Ternus got a cheeky introduction from his predecessor Tim Cook before boldly referencing some classic Steve Jobs moments and setting the company’s most important product on a new course.

I appreciated the video’s opening conceit, which was essentially a cinematic debate about what makes for a great opening scene, leading to Tim Cook narrating his own entrance to Apple Park—and then, in a twist, explaining that he’s not the main character of this story, it’s the other guy—namely Ternus. What a great, ego-deflating moment of support—and it stuck the landing in the way that many Apple introductory segments don’t, feeling either a bit too silly or a bit too smug.

(I also appreciated the direction of this video, which made sure that the scenes behind presenters were actually populated. Past videos made it feel like Apple Park was abandoned after some sort of apocalypse, while this one made it feel like everyone at Apple was still hard at work on making the company’s next batch of products. And it allowed for some low-key levity, like the segment set at a Hollywood backlot that featured a fake rainstorm falling on film noir characters and Apple presenters alike, a collection of Roman soldiers marching with a classical composer, and a couple of astronauts riding on the back of a golf cart.)

After professing what a privilege it was to represent Apple, Ternus quickly turned to a defense of the iPhone, and the smartphone more generally, as a cornerstone of our digital worlds. In casting the tech product at the center of our experiences as an “intelligent personal hub,” Ternus was alluding to Jobs’s declaration more than 25 years ago that the Mac was the center of a “digital hub.” In modern terms, the smartphone certainly fills that role, connecting to accessories and bringing in data from disparate sources.

Not only was it bold to tie the first pronouncement of a new Apple CEO to a famous Jobs strategy, but it was also bold to use the moment to take a direct shot at competitors who seek to replace the smartphone with unspecified new AI-infused tech products. It has always seemed obvious to me that the smartphone is just too perfectly positioned, with the right set of attributes, to survive whatever an AI-infused future might throw at it.

Ternus’s opening remarks fed into that, referencing the key features that make the iPhone such a powerfully useful product: It’s always with you, has a powerful processor, a great display, is always connected to a high-speed network, has high-quality sensors, and has a battery big enough to last all day. I have a hard time believing that even a deeply AI-heavy future won’t require all of those features, and it’s already in our pockets.

Of course, he would say that. He’s the CEO of a company that sells devices, primarily smartphones. But I think he’s also right.

Apple’s take on AI

Still, Apple is a tech company, and everything in its sphere is touched by AI now, so the company needed more than a profession that the iPhone was just great at AI, thank you. And so Ternus and his team worked to define Apple’s place in our AI-focused world—in some interesting ways.

Obviously, the presentation spent a lot of time discussing Apple Intelligence, which—after a two-year delay—is finally living up to its promise. The new Siri AI assistant is quite good, and it will provide iPhone users with a satisfying experience for casually looking up information and performing tasks, whether it’s world knowledge or personal data that lives on their devices. Apple is about to turn a real weakness into—well, if not a strength, then at least no longer an Achilles heel.

Apple also pressed its advantage when it comes to designing its own processors, which give the iPhone a strong story in terms of on-device AI. You can see how Apple has begun to prioritize AI benchmarks—the new A20 Pro processor has two Neural Engines (just as the M6 chip does), offers a bunch of next-gen GPU cores with neural accelerators, and has a 50% boost in memory bandwidth.

How much AI work is currently being done on-device on smartphones? Probably not much, but perhaps a little, and over time if app developers want to minimize their reliance on expensive (and potentially non-private) cloud services, they may gravitate toward using the features Apple provides on device. This is a bet by Apple that on-device AI becomes more prominent over time, but if you design your own chips and sell your own smartphones, it’s the right bet to make. I’ve seen the pendulum swing from processing being focused in the cloud to it happening on personal devices more than once. It would not surprise me at all if it happens again, and Apple is positioning itself to be ready if it does.

But there were some appreciably non-obvious examples of Apple’s approach to AI in the event, as well. Apple has said previously that it would support SynthID, a feature that tags AI-generated content. What it hadn’t previously revealed is that it’s built Apple Reference Image, a system that cryptographically signs the original pixel data from an iPhone camera’s sensor in a way that can verify that a photo is unedited. Accepting that most photos do get edited, Apple has built the system in a way that the signed, unedited original rides along with the version you’re processing and editing—but even if you edit the image, there’s a method to view the original and make sure that it’s properly reflecting reality.

I don’t know enough about this category to know if there are similar implementations from other groups, or if there’s an emerging standard that Apple is either inventing or avoiding, but it sure does sound like a good idea to have a way to say that a photograph was really taken from an iPhone’s image sensor and wasn’t just fabricated.

Finally, Apple’s most surprising AI announcement of the day, one that I doubt anyone had on their bingo card, is that Apple is apparently making the Apple Watch an AI wearable. The new Apple Watch models, apparently in conjunction with a fairly modern iPhone, have a feature that listens to your conversation and lets you display what someone said for the previous 15 seconds. It’s like TiVo for… reality? And then there’s Siri Recap, which listens to everything and writes high-level notes based on your conversations. It’s AI meeting notes for your life.

These features are wild, and if you haven’t noticed, they are coming at a time when people are increasingly critical of tech companies intruding into places that were previously presumed to be at least a bit private. Fortunately, Apple does have a fairly positive reputation when it comes to privacy, and the company has detailed technically how these features work—no audio files are saved, apps have no access to audio data, and the AI transcription engine runs on audio in a buffer. But since we live in a world where people are already convinced their phones listen to them and use their conversations to send them ads, I’m not convinced the nuance of a statement like “my Apple Watch is listening to our conversation, but it’s not recording” is going to go over well.

I’m curious just how much of this feature is happening on the Apple Watch and how much is happening on the connected iPhone. Is the Apple Watch just there to listen to audio, make disclaimer chimes to warn people they’re being monitored, and pass the audio on to the iPhone for processing? Is the Apple Watch performing a raw transcription of audio chunks into text and passing that on to the iPhone for assembly into more understandable blocks of text? I’m sure it’ll all come out. And then we’ll all need to judge: are either of these features useful enough to make it worth the trouble of explaining to other people that things are being captured? It’s worth considering the inverse, too: Does Apple’s admirable commitment to privacy lead to summaries that aren’t especially helpful or actionable?

A lot of questions, not a lot of answers—yet.

I’d argue that Apple can’t afford to not try features like this, however. Our culture may ultimately reject even the most privacy-focused AI recording features, whether they come in camera glasses or attentive smartwatches. But if there’s any valid, non-creepy case to be made for this sort of technology, someone needs to make it. I know a lot of people will roll their eyes at this, but this is one of those times when the phrase “only Apple can do this” might actually be true. They’re taking a swing, and I admire that. It may not be enough.

Keep in mind that there’s another invasive AI feature rumored to be attached to a future Apple product—namely, the next generation of AirPods Pro, which may come with embedded cameras. I assume Apple’s explanation of these new Apple Watch features is a preview of how camera-bearing AirPods would be explained—namely, that the image data is walled off, inaccessible, processed by AI algorithms on device and then discarded. If these Apple Watch features become wildly unpopular, it might be a hint to stow those AirPods. If people accept Apple’s assurances, maybe things will be different.

The main event

Off to the iPhone, the big reason Apple does these events. Of course, the iPhone Duo is the most interesting and different iPhone in years, if ever. I can’t wait to play with one. It’s an incredibly complex piece of hardware engineering that also generates hundreds of serious usability issues for iOS and all the apps that run on it.

At first glance, Apple seems to have gotten really creative in trying to solve those usability issues. There was a time when Apple might have introduced a product like this and just explained that while you could rest the device partially open at an angle, horizontally or vertically, those angles simply weren’t supported and you should only ever use the product open or closed. And a lot of us would’ve shrugged and said, well, okay Apple, I get that we’re asking a lot by wanting you to cover all the bases right away. Maybe next year?

Not the iPhone Duo. While I’m sure there will be some frustrating edge cases, this product announcement shows what can happen when a company is fully committed to bringing its entire organization to bear on supporting a new piece of hardware. There’s a new multitasking model, support for Apple Pencil on iOS for the first time(!), the ability for apps to run on both inside and outside screens at once, Apple’s first under-display camera, an entirely reoriented iOS dock and set of toolbars, and a whole lot more.

It’s almost overwhelming, but it’s also clearly the right way to launch a product like this. It would make no sense for Apple to spend years developing a folding iPhone… and then deciding to shrug and release a half-baked iOS update to support it. If a company boasts about how the integration of hardware and software is its secret sauce, this is the moment when it needs to back that up with action. Feels to me like it has.

As exciting as this all is, let’s not forget that folding phones are a teeny portion of the overall smartphone market. Not only is this the most expensive iPhone ever, but it’ll probably be the worst seller of the iPhone line, at least to start. And in doing so, it’ll probably be the best-selling folding phone of all time. Apple’s endorsement of this style of device will drive sales of other folding phones, too. Just don’t expect it to take over the world. If it sells as well as the iPhone Air, it would be quite a coup.

That’s because most people will want to buy the iPhone 18 Pro. While that product pales in comparison to the alien newness of the iPhone Duo, it’s also exactly the phone most people will want to buy. The new camera upgrade, which adds a moving aperture to the iPhone for the first time, should offer a serious improvement in an array of shots. I’m sad that Apple has seemingly retired Cosmic Orange this year, but that’s okay, it’s just resting—I predict a nostalgic orange iPhone comeback in a year or two.

Bottom line—the iPhone 17 Pro was a huge hit and I suspect the 18 Pro will be, too. Yes, it starts at $100 more than the past models, but what doesn’t? I’m actually relieved Apple didn’t raise the price by $150 or $200. The iPhone 18 Pro might not be the one most people talk about, but it’ll be the one most people buy. (And then in the spring, we’ll see how the iPhone 18 fares as a phone released out of the spotlight of the big fall iPhone event.)

In the long run, though, is the iPhone Duo the future of the iPhone line? It depends on what you mean by “long run.” It seems to me that the impulse of the iPhone Duo and all folding phones is based on the premise that phone users want huge displays (true) but at some point those displays just don’t fit in their pockets (a sad fact of physics and tailoring). Wouldn’t you want the biggest screen that also fits in your pocket? If so, then at some point that ideal device becomes a foldable, or rollable, or some other kind of shape that can be large when in use and small when it’s stowed away.

Now is probably not that time. (Certainly not at that price.) But its time may yet come, especially as Apple does its thing and just keeps iterating, making the iPhone Duo thinner and lighter and more full featured over time.

I can’t wait to try out the iPhone Duo. As someone who spends a lot of time using an iPad, I’m seriously intrigued if it might fit in my life as a primary device. But for most people, it will be not just too expensive, but too weird. That’s fine. Apple strikes me as a company that’s willing to be patient—while making a lot of money from people who want to be out there on the cutting edge.

For everyone else, there’s the iPhone 18 Pro. And that’s as it should be.

We’ll all know soon enough, but kudos to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman for breaking some new details 12 hours before Apple’s event begins:

Its device, called the iPhone Duo, will start at $2,000… The entry-level version will include 256 gigabytes of storage, with Apple offering higher-capacity versions that will take the price all the way up to roughly $3,000…. There will be a magnetic hinge system and support for the Apple Pencil stylus.

The Duo will go on sale as early as October and come in white and dark blue.

iPhone Duo is a good name. Not only does it make sense — two screens! — but it references an old Apple product name, and keeps iPhone Ultra in reserve for future use.

I’ve been wondering about Apple Pencil support on the iPhone for some time now. This product does sort of make sense for it, given the larger canvas of an interior screen.

The starting price seems high in practical terms, but also actually quite aggressive given the current out-of-control state of affairs for tech gadget costs. (Obviously the better configurations will escalate rapidly in price, as is Apple’s tradition.)

Gurman also suggests this device won’t ship as quickly as the new iPhone Pro models—again, not too much of a surprise, as that’s what happened with the iPhone X. And as for the colors, well, dark blue is certainly more interesting than another Space Gray. I do wonder why the Color Czar has decided that black is out as a color, but fashion does what it wants.

Anyway, happy Christmas Eve (and Christmas morning) everyone. See you back here after all is revealed.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

General Motors has been saying for a few years now that it’s going to get rid of CarPlay and Android Auto on its EVs because, well, reasons.

Well, well, well… maybe not. Ian Wright of CarBuzz writes:

The Cadillac configurator is up for several 2027 models, and we spotted that the Lyriq still shows CarPlay and Android Auto being standard. The Lyriq is Cadillac’s first all-electric vehicle and a tech-forward vehicle that we think is becoming one of the best luxury EVs available. So, it piqued our interest that the GM brand was still including the things it was supposed to be phasing out, and we reached out to Cadillac for comment.

“Cadillac is continuing to evolve its infotainment strategy across the EV portfolio, based on customer feedback, while also prioritizing the native, in-vehicle experience,” a Cadillac representative told CarBuzz. And, the language is telling. The plan was to start the phasing out of phone projection with the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV, with CEO Mary Barra saying: “We made a decision to prioritize our EV vehicles during this timeframe, and as we go forward, we’ll continue across the portfolio.”

Wright does a good job at spotting the weasel words in the new Cadillac statement. Three years after a bold pronouncement that GM wasn’t interested in listening to its customers and giving them what they wanted, here comes an “evolve[d] infotainment strategy… based on customer feedback.”

Translation: Oh, people actually do want CarPlay, so we probably should let them have it, or they’re not going to want to buy our cars.

This isn’t how this story needed to go, but if GM wants to silently walk back its stupid pronouncement from 2023, it’s still a win for anyone in the market for a new car.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

A few months ago I added a “Report a Typo” feature to Six Colors. The goal was to give people a simple place to go — sixcolors.com/typo — if they found a mistake on the website. That Google form inserts the information into a Google Sheet, and a script attached to the Google Sheet kicks off a simple automation that sends me a notification in a couple different places.

This works pretty well. I’m using a very simple Google Apps script to fire off a webhook when there’s a new form submission. The webhook is running on Make.com, which we use for a bunch of simple web automations, but that’s an implementation detail. Make.com posts an item in a private Discord channel and also crafts a custom push notification to my phone using Pushover.

However, the moment I turned this feature on, I discovered the problem with asking people to report errors or typos: Some people see any open channel of communication as an open channel for any sort of communication. I immediately started getting more “this is more a comment than a question” items about articles than actual typo submissions. Commentary included personal preferences for writing style, web design, political references (real or imagined), and much more.

I’m going to make an admission: This sort of feedback is maddening. I want to be alerted about mistakes on the site so I can fix them promptly, but I am not interested in receiving push notifications regarding your opinion of the professionalism and appropriateness of my writing style.

Unfortunately, it’s an open form. There’s nothing to be done. Or is there?

This is a challenge that can’t really be solved by looking for a bunch of keywords. You need wholesale sentiment analysis of the entire submission. This is—brace yourself—actually a good use of a large language model.

I solved this problem by using a plug-in within Make.com that lets me get a reply back from a cloud LLM that uses a simple model with an API cost of pennies per use, but you could also just use Shortcuts to build a version of this automation that runs on a Mac (Tahoe or Golden Gate) using Apple’s built-in models. It works just fine in Shortcuts on my Mac, via the Use Model action. (See screenshot above.)

Here’s the prompt I’m currently using:

Your task is binary classification.

Input: a user-submitted comment about an article, claiming to report an error.

Output: one token only: ALLOW or REJECT.

Definition of ALLOW:
A concrete, objective, verifiable issue in the article. This includes:
* factual mistakes
* spelling, grammar, formatting mistakes
* broken or incorrect links
* wrong names, dates, numbers
* technical inaccuracies
* omissions of material consequences of a feature or change (e.g., failing to mention that a feature deletes stored Wi-Fi passwords)

Definition of REJECT:
Anything subjective. This includes:
* political disagreement
* tone or style complaints
* metaphor or comparison preferences
* ‘you should have covered X more’
* speculation about motives
* emotional reactions or rants
* admissions that it’s not actually a mistake

Classification rules:
1. If the comment identifies a specific factual, technical, or materially consequential issue in the article, return ALLOW.
2. If the issue would meaningfully affect reader understanding or use of a product/feature, treat it as an omission and return ALLOW.
3. If the comment is opinion, taste, politics, vibe, personal criticism, or preference, return REJECT.
4. If there is no concrete, verifiable claim about the article being wrong or incomplete, return REJECT.
5. If it’s off-topic or spam, return REJECT.
6. If it’s a short but simple phrase like “there not their” or “r/sheild/shield”, those are nerdier folks reporting typos and that’s fine, ALLOW.

Respond with exactly one of these two tokens: ALLOW or REJECT. No explanation.

Submission: [[insert report text here]]

This has worked surprisingly well. And, yes, all messages are logged in the original Google Sheet, so I can occasionally check to monitor the quality of the filtering and make sure that the system isn’t failing to pass on actual mistakes.

Today Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO and Phil Schiller is scaling back his involvement in the company’s events and his supervision of the App Store.

I thought I’d find the oldest Tim Cook photo in my Photos library (what, do you not have numerous Apple executives in your People view?) and it’s from October 2008:

This was from the post-event Q&A session, back when that was a thing!

In the video of this event you’ll see that Tim Cook, then Apple’s COO, is asked by Steve Jobs to present “the state of the Mac.” If you’re used to Cook being more of an emcee for presentations by others in a pre-baked video, you may be amused to see him working hard to present Apple’s Mac lineup to an in-person crowd of media people. (There’s also a Jony Ive live presentation!)

The big product from this event: the unibody MacBook Pro, including an all-button multitouch trackpad.

Happy trails to Tim and Phil, though it sure sounds like they’re still going to be haunting the corridors of Apple Park for years to come.

Joe Lemire of Sports Business Journal has a detailed story about how MLB came to hire Jason Weingradt, the developer behind the amazing baseball app Mosaic:

By drawing on public application programming interfaces (APIs) from the league and other sources, Weingradt built an app in TestFlight — Apple’s home for products still in beta — and shared his new creation, Mosaic, by posting on Threads and tagging #buildinpublic to solicit early adopter feedback….

That very same day, MLB Executive Vice President Kenny Gersh received a Slack message from colleagues alerting him to Mosaic and asking if the league’s legal team should get involved. While of course not wanting just any developer to profit from baseball’s IP, Gersh appreciated that this was a controlled environment that required an MLB.tv subscription to access premium features, so he replied, “Not ideal, but it’s not a huge problem yet. Maybe we’ll hire.”

They hired. I know there’s a lot of skepticism out there about whether the big organization will just crush the Little App That Could. To me, it says a lot about MLB’s tech brain trust that they embraced Weingradt and that he’s still dropping incredibly impressive new features into the app on a regular basis.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Jason Snell is a journalist, podcaster, and Jeopardy! contestant. The editor-in-chief of Macworld for 17 years, he currently runs the Apple-focused website Six Colors and appears regularly on several podcasts, including MacBreak Weekly and Upgrade. His latest podcast, Designed in California, details the 50-year history of Apple over 50 episodes.

We talked to Snell about some of his favorite apps for streamlining his podcasting and writing workflows.

Continue reading on The Mac App Store ↦

Apple’s Friday Night Baseball made its immersive video debut on the Vision Pro Friday, with numerous live immersive cameras scattered around Yankee Stadium for the night’s game between the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Apple has produced a lot of immersive video, including some sports documentaries and a set of live L.A. Lakers games, and it’s been clear that the makers of all that content have assumed that immersive video should be produced more or less like regular sports content: with lots of quick cuts, despite the fact that quick cuts in immersive video can be disorienting in a way that cuts in standard 16:9, 2-D video aren’t.

There’s no clear agreement about the ideal solution. I didn’t mind the reduced pace of the NBA broadcast, which toggled between cameras under each basket, but Stratechery’s Ben Thompson felt strongly that the best option would’ve been a single camera at mid-court, to completely eliminate the disorienting cuts and replicate being at the game in person.

Apple’s approach with baseball, at least based on Friday’s game, seems to lean toward Thompson’s preferred approach—and it does benefit from it. Each half inning was shown from a single camera on the dugout rail next to the on-deck circle, giving a great view of pitcher and hitter and the infield, as well as the goings on right in front of the dugout in foul territory. The camera switched between innings, so you were always viewing from the perspective of the at-bat team’s dugout.

Making it all work better was Apple’s addition of a “virtual jumbotron” floating in the sky, a scoreboard with graphics and a video feed of the standard 16:9 telecast on Apple TV. It was easy to look up and catch a replay or even get a better view of something happening in the far-off outfield, without getting in the way of my view of the game itself.

In between innings, the broadcast stayed in the park—and this is when it would occasionally switch to a different angle, such as at the outfield fence, behind first base, in the club level behind home plate, or looking down into the dugout. There were also replays—carefully demarcated with animated graphics, to reduce confusion—of key plays from the previous inning from the immersive perspective.

In the end, it felt much more like I was sitting at Yankee Stadium watching the game. Apple’s dedicated commentators tried to point out things you couldn’t see if you were watching a standard telecast, like defensive positioning. The commentary was fine (though I wish it had been a bit less chatty), but I would also have been happy to have the option to listen to natural audio, or just the local radio broadcast.

I do wish there had been a little bit more experimentation in terms of the primary camera angle. (Disclosure: I only watched three innings before needing to leave home to catch a flight.) I would’ve been interested in seeing an inning from behind first or third base, just to get a little bit of a different angle.

Still, I think Apple’s first immersive live baseball production was successful. I saw the Yankee catcher commit interference and then get hit in the arm by a brutal backswing; I saw a wide throw from shortstop almost (but not quite) pull the first baseman off the bag. I saw Yankee manager Aaron Boone constantly spitting a stream of sunflower seeds on the warning track in front of the dugout rail. And most delightfully, every few minutes a train zipped past the stadium out in the outfield, visible in a crack between the stands and the scoreboard.

Will immersive sports amount to anything? I don’t think anyone knows, but this latest experiment suggests that the people producing Apple’s immersive sports are actually learning and experimenting. I’m encouraged, and I’ll tune in next week for sure.

Today Relay launched the public and private feeds of my new podcast, Designed in California. If you’re interested in the history of Apple, check it out. The first few episodes in the feed are episodes we previously released in the Upgrade podcast feed; our first all-new episode debuts next week.

If you’re a Kickstarter backer who pledged at a level where you’ll get the special member feeds, check your messages for information about how to redeem that pledge and get access to the special feeds.

And if you didn’t back the Kickstarter, you can now join us via Relay and get access to entire series of the show all at once, ad free. Next week, members will receive the entirety of our series about Apple’s mid-90s Mac OS crisis that led to the company buying NeXT and bringing back Steve Jobs, which led to the creation of Mac OS X. Those episodes will play out over the next six weeks in the main feed, but members will get all seven episodes, five hours and 15 minutes of content, all at once. (Plus the first of our monthly bonus episodes.)

There’s also a YouTube channel, and Spotify users will find that video version available within Spotify as well.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

In a bit of a late-August surprise while the world awaits word on the next generation of iPhones, on Tuesday Apple announced two new processors, the M5 Ultra and M6, which help power new iterations of its Mac Studio and Mac mini desktop computers. Both models are available to pre-order now and will ship on September 22 and will run macOS 27 Golden Gate.

Bridging the generations

The M6 chip kicks off Apple’s next chip generation, and is its first based on a 2-nanometer production process. It’s also got the first 12-core CPU in Apple’s base M-series chip line, up from 10 cores in the M4 and M5 generations.

Those CPU cores are in an interesting configuration: The M6 is the first Apple chip to mix all three of its CPU core types. The chip has six efficiency cores, four performance cores, and two super cores. According to Apple, each core design is focused on a different primary task: efficiency cores are meant to sip power (useful when running simple background tasks); performance cores are optimized for complex, multi-threaded jobs; and super cores were created to offer the highest possible single-threaded performance.

Apple claims that this design results in record-setting single-threaded performance and up to 1.2x speed improvements over the M5 chip. The M6 also offers a dual 16-core Neural Engine, for on-device AI performance. Memory bandwidth peaks at 170GB/s, 10 percent faster than the M5.

Just as the new chip generation arrives, the previous one (launched in October 2025) is completed. The M5 Ultra is Apple’s first new Ultra chip since it introduced the M3 Ultra in March 2025. Apple says it’s using the next generation of its UltraFusion technology to connect two dual-die M5 Max chips to make Apple silicon’s first quad-die chip. UltraFusion connects the two dies with bandwidth of more than 4.4TB/s, letting the four dies work as a single chip.

The M5 Ultra offers up to 36 CPU cores (12 super/24 performance), which Apple says results in up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra. It offers up to 80 GPU cores and up to 512GB of memory with 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth.

Meet the Mac mini

Previously available in M4 and M4 Pro configurations, the new Mac mini is available in M6 and M5 Pro chip options. The new base price is $899, up $100 from the previous base, for the same standard 16GB RAM/256GB storage configuration. The M5 Pro configuration starts at $1699, also up $100 from the model sold until Tuesday. (But keep in mind, the M4 Mac mini was introduced at $599 before Apple recently raised that price. Put together, it’s a 50% price increase over the model introduced almost two years ago. We all know why, but it still hurts.)

Because the Mac mini previously shipped with M4 processors, this new model picks up numerous improvements Apple made in the M5 generation, including GPUs better optimized for AI performance. Both models support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 via Apple’s N1 chip, and 2.5Gb Ethernet is now standard, with 10Gb Ethernet still available as an add-on. The M6 model supports Thunderbolt 4, but the M5 Pro model supports Thunderbolt 5.

Mac Studio advances in unison

At the same moment the Mac mini becomes split between two chip generations, the Mac Studio gets reunified with chips from the same generation: the M5 Max and the new M5 Ultra. As mentioned previously, the M5 Ultra is basically two M5 Max chips connected together by Apple’s dense, fast UltraFusion technology. Apple boasts that the M5 Ultra is the fastest chip Apple has ever created, which isn’t much of a stretch since the M5 Max was already pretty far up there.

The Mac Studio is effectively the replacement for the Mac Pro, and it’s alone in offering the Ultra-class chip. Apple has positioned the Mac Studio as ideal for local AI workflows, and the new models will still be able to cluster via Thunderbolt 5 to create even larger collections of memory and performance. Apple representatives pointed out that a four-Mac Studio AI cluster, like the one I saw on display at WWDC earlier this summer, is so efficient that it can be powered from a single standard wall outlet. (They even showed us a picture of four Mac Studios plugged into a power strip that was plugged into the wall.) In an era of data center excesses, Apple is clearly leaning into the possibility of small, efficient Macs being used to do local AI work rather than relying on huge, power-hungry cloud models.

As with the Mac mini, the Mac Studio gains M5 chip improvements that benefit AI models running on GPU cores, integrate the N1 chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and support 2x faster storage with speeds up to 15GB/s.

The M5 Max Mac Studio starts at $2499, the same as the M4 model on sale until Tuesday. (But keep in mind, it was introduced 17 months ago for $1999.) The M5 Ultra model starts at $5499, up $200 from the M3 Ultra model previously on sale (which was itself originally offered for $3999).

My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week.

With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Designed from the ground up to protect your privacy, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances. It stops you from being followed by ads around the web and with App Ad Blocking and Apple TV Ad Blocking it stops your app usage and viewing history being harvested by ad networks.

So, join the community of over 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.

Back in March I took possession of an Aqara UWB Smart Lock, which allowed me to live out my Star Trek dreams by using Ultra Wideband technology to sense my arrival and unlock the door without any interaction from me. Now a second UWB lock has arrived on the scene, Schlage’s Sense Pro UWB smart lock. I’ve spent the last month locking and unlocking my front door with it, and it’s got some definite strengths over the Aqara lock—as well as some definite weaknesses.

Let’s start with the prices. The Aqara is $269, and the Schlage lock is $400. While it can be hard to justify a smart lock at any price, it’s extremely difficult to recommend one lock with much the same feature set over another when there’s this kind of price disparity.

And yes, these locks are very much playing by the same playbook: Both use UWB and Apple’s HomeKey technology to detect when your iPhone (11 or newer) or Apple Watch (Series 6 or newer) approaches your door, unlocking without having to wait or tap your device against the keypad. You can read my previous review for more about how this works, but it’s a huge improvement on both NFC tap-to-unlock and Bluetooth proximity detection, because it can wirelessly detect if you’re inside or outside the door—and only unlocks when you’re approaching from the outside.

The Schlage Sense Pro trades versatility for compactness and attractiveness. The Aqara lock is a big black slab, compared to a relatively squat keypad that comes in either black or satin nickel (a perfect match for my front door hardware). Schlage’s lock is undeniably better looking. It also has a light-up keypad so you can unlock it with a code, and you can program additional codes via the Schlage app or directly via the Apple Home app. And it supports NFC unlock, so if someone in your house doesn’t have a UWB device, they still have an avenue to electronically unlock the door via a tap.

Past Schlage smart locks—I used one for several years before buying the Aqara UWB model—offered a little 9-volt battery nubbin at the bottom of the outside to provide emergency power if the device’s batteries died and you needed to get into the house. This model has a USB-C port to do the same thing, and I don’t know about you, but I’m far more likely to source a USB-C cable (and an iPhone to provide power) than I am to find a 9-volt battery laying around outside my house.

Unlike the Aqara lock, the Schlage Sense Pro doesn’t have a thumbprint scanner or a physical key. The Aqara’s thumbprint scanner works but always seemed a bit pointless to me; the key, on the other hand, might have value if you like the idea of using a hide-a-key or giving a physical spare key to a friend. Alternately, it might seem unnecessary or even a security flaw. Trade-offs.

The Schlage Sense Pro is powered by four AA batteries that slide into the lock in a plastic sled; I found that if I was too forceful sliding the sled in, a battery occasionally popped out. I strongly prefer Aqara’s battery solution—a power-bank-style rechargeable battery pack that offers long life and a relatively easy USB charging path—to swapping AA batteries every so often.

My front door is not quite perfectly aligned, so automatic locks sometimes fail to lock it properly. The Schlage’s lock motor is forceful enough to do the job, but a lot less forceful than the Aqara’s, which would often have enough oomph to get the door closed even if it had to push really hard. In truth, though, both locks were equal in their ability to lock my weird door, though Aqara is much more aggressive in making a noise when it fails to lock the door, which I appreciated more than Schlage’s somewhat muted alert.

I also appreciated Aqara’s gesture to lock the door when leaving the house—you basically tap the pad anywhere—to be a lot easier to use than the Schlage lock, which requires you tap the top portion of the touch pad twice. I got used to the double-tap, but Aqara’s was faster and less fussy.

When testing the Schlage Sense Pro, I also ran into a very odd quirk where the lock became completely unresponsive until I pulled the battery sled out and put it back in—essentially, power cycling the lock. According to Schlage, this was likely due to a faulty lock and the company supplied me with a replacement that hasn’t shown any signs of the same issue.

Both locks do a great job of unlocking automatically. This is what the whole show is really about: If I walk up to a door with my watch on my wrist or my phone in my pocket, does the door unlock by the time I put my hand on the latch? Yes, almost all the time. Very occasionally there would be a slight pause when I reached the door, but almost never. It really is a magical feeling to have your door know that it’s you and unlock as you approach, and if you connect it to other HomeKit automations, you can have that unlock trigger other devices, like turning on your entryway lights.

In the end, the Schlage Sense Pro is a very nice lock, with a restrained look that I prefer to the Aqara’s industrial black block. Aqara’s extra locking methods (fingerprint, traditional key) are not really ones I feel are necessary. Yes, Aqara’s battery approach is better than Schlage’s, but I’ve been using AA-powered locks for ages, and it was fine, if a little annoying.

All in all, these locks are pretty close to even, with Schlage having the advantage in aesthetics. The problem is that the Schlage lock costs $130 more than the Aqara. If you don’t mind the extra charge for a more attractive lock, I won’t fault you, but for most people a smart lock is a bit of a splurge purchase as it is. It’s not the kind of product that can be snuck by household members who are less enthusiastic about technology, and sometimes the price tag is all it takes for the household to decide that it’s not worth doing.

The Schlage Sense Pro is a great product that brings that Star Trek feeling to my front door—but at a price that makes me wince. The first UWB lock that arrived on the scene, Aqara’s U400, is equally capable—and a lot cheaper.

When I was visiting my pal Myke Hurley in London last year, I noticed that he had a second display to the right of his main one. It was large and mounted vertically, and when he recorded a podcast, he kept all his recording information over there. I liked the idea of monitoring my recordings while they were going on, just for extra peace of mind, and a second display seemed like the right way to do it.

If only I had a second display! But I do, of course, because my main Mac is now a MacBook Pro. So I’ve taken to recording podcasts using the “Hurley Method,” with my Audio Hijack windows positioned on the laptop display, off to my left.

It’s nice, but if you know me, I quickly became frustrated by the number of clicks and drags I needed to perform every single time I record a podcast: Open up my laptop, open Audio Hijack, open the list of recording sessions, double-click on the one I’m using right now, then drag the window over to the laptop display.

So today I automated it.

None of my automations work if I haven’t opened the laptop, and while it sits next to my Mac in a nice stand from Twelve South, it’s closed most of the time. So my first step before moving windows to the laptop display is to make sure that the display is available! Fortunately, there’s a command-line command for that:

system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType

If you want, you can simplify the output by piping it through a grep command like system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType | grep -B1 "Resolution", but all I really want to do is search for the text string “Built-in”, which indicates that the laptop is open and its built-in display is running.

I automate most of my recording stuff using Keyboard Maestro macros triggered by an Elgato Stream Deck. So I built my automation into an existing macro in Keyboard Maestro, just adding a new if/then statement: If the calculation `SCREENCOUNT() > 1 returns true.

Then the macro runs the shell script, saves that to a local variable called LocalScreens, and it’s time for one more if/then statement, to ensure that this part of the macro only runs when more than one screen is attached and when the internal MacBook Pro display is active.

Unfortunately, the next step requires automating Audio Hijack, and while that app is very scriptable via JavaScript, and controllable via Shortcuts (or a plain text file?!), there’s no direct method of automating it from within Keyboard Maestro. So I created a basic Shortcut containing the JavaScript required to tell Audio Hijack to open a specific session by name, with the name passed to the Shortcut as input:

Then it’s a one-step item in Keyboard Maestro to run that shortcut with the name of my Audio Hijack session as the input:

(I wish this was cleaner and I didn’t need to run a shortcut. The alternative is to literally write out a text file containing the JavaScript and run it via a shell script. Is that cleaner? Doesn’t feel like it, but it’s more self-contained and doesn’t rely on the good graces of Shortcuts.)

Now that I know that my MacBook Pro display is open and my Audio Hijack session window is open, it’s a one-step command in Keyboard Maestro to make the move:

This one’s a little tricky. I have to use the Move and Resize Window command, but instead of standard numerical values, I need to use custom “smart” values that Keyboard Maestro supports. In this case, horizontally it’s SCREENVISIBLE(Internal,MidX)-600 —essentially, 600 pixels to the left of the midpoint of the internal display—and vertically it’s SCREENVISIBLE(Internal,MidY)-250—250 pixels up from the midpoint of the display. You can play around with the dimensions until the window ends up in the right spot, and of course, at the right size.

And that was it. Now, when I press my recording button on my Stream Deck, if my laptop display is open, the session window will automatically pop open on my laptop display. I sure do like it when things happen on my computer automatically.

Formerly indie developer Jason Weingardt, on Threads:

Some personal news: I’ve joined the team at Major League Baseball, and the Mosaic app has come with me. The last 3+ months have, without question, been the wildest of my life. I’m beyond thankful to MLB for the chance to help shape how fans experience baseball, and even more thankful to the community of fans around the world who tried Mosaic, filed bug reports and feature requests, and helped shape it along the way.

We believe Mosaic can be a valuable tool to help learn more about what fans want…. I will keep working on Mosaic as part of my job…. Most importantly: Mosaic is sticking around. Features may come and go, but my ask is that you continue to write in with your feedback about what you like, don’t like, and what you’d want to see in a baseball app. I’m excited for what’s next, and I hope you are too.

Mosaic is a baseball app that’s been in TestFlight for a few months. (Scroll back through Weingardt’s Threads history for details.) From the moment I saw it, I was dazzled—it’s a great iOS baseball app that uses all of Apple’s platform technologies to lay out live game data and show off other MLB features in ways that MLB’s own app just doesn’t. And it even integrated with MLB TV, so if you’re a subscriber to MLB’s premium video service, you can watch games via Mosaic, including in the most mind-blowing multiview I’ve seen.

I don’t want to lean too much into the current state of the official MLB app, but it used to be so cutting-edge and great that when I was at Macworld, we gave it a zillion awards and ended up just inducting it into our “app hall of fame.” But over the years, that app has become generic and unfocused and one-size-fits-all. It is no longer a joy to use.

So Jason Weingardt wrote Mosaic, by himself, and it’s a properly great iOS app (that also runs on iPad and Mac and, as of today, Apple TV). I ran into Weingardt at WWDC and he was so happy that people had already fallen in love with his own personal semi-secret passion project.

We all pretty much expected Mosaic to be crushed by MLB once it figured out what was going on. No matter that it was using public APIs and honoring MLB’s own premium content subscriptions, it just felt like the kind of thing that was too good to be true.

Instead, to their immense credit, MLB hired Weingardt, and Mosaic is now apparently a part of MLB’s digital strategy. I almost can’t believe it. It’s the best possible outcome for Weingardt, MLB, and baseball fans with Apple devices.

I’m so happy to think that MLB’s apps may now be on a trajectory to go back to where they belong—in the app hall of fame.

I’m a huge fan of displaying ambient information in my computer interfaces, which on my Mac tends to involve putting data about weather, solar power and the like in my menu bar, so it’s available at a glance. My tool of choice for this is SwiftBar, itself a follow-on to BitBar (which has been rebooted as xbar). On my iPad, I’ve been using custom widgets generated with Simon Støvring’s Scriptable app to do the job.

Now here’s a new contender that generates widgets on both Mac and iOS: Brett Terpstra’s $20 TerminalWidget, which lets you send data to a widget from a command-line script, Shortcut, AppleScript, or a URL scheme.

Widgets are more complicated than little items that live in the menu bar. That’s why Scriptable uses little JavaScript scripts to build them. TerminalWidget has a basic set of terminology that lets you target specific widgets and provides some pre-filled functionality that lets you generate some design elements without much hassle. It’ll also just… take text you give it and display it if you want.

If you’re working via Shortcuts, you can update TerminalWidget using a bunch of different template types: Chart, Image, Progress, Table, or Text. Just as with the command line, each Shortcuts action contains a bunch of variables, so you can customize colors and fonts, add a caption and title, or other things that help fill out TerminalWidget’s templates. It’s by design a lot less flexible than something like Scriptable, where the sky’s the limit—but it’s also a lot more approachable, since you’re basically filling in the blanks with whatever data you want to provide.

I wasn’t really able to replicate my beloved Scriptable weather widget in TerminalWidget—not flexible enough—but TerminalWidget also supports straight-up image use, which allowed me to generate the contents of my Scriptable widget via script, output it as an image, and then tell TerminalWidget to load that image. So if you wanted to offload widget duties to your Mac or a remote server, you could do that and just display the image in TerminalWidget.

In a way, TerminalWidget turns its limitation (lack of flexibility) into a strength, because the learning curve is so gentle, especially if you use Shortcuts, which literally shows you every single possible variable you could possibly use, so you can tinker and figure out what you want to display. Dr. Drang is using it for planetary positions, because that tickles his fancy. If there’s something you’d like to put on a glanceable widget across iPad, iPhone, and Mac, TerminalWidget will let you do it. That’s a beautiful thing. Now I need to figure out what widgets to add to my own devices…

This is turning out to be the year of immersive sports.

In January, Apple worked with Spectrum and the L.A. Lakers to debut a series of immersive NBA games. And beginning August 28, it’ll be airing a live immersive Major League Baseball game every Friday night for the rest of the Friday Night Baseball season.

Unlike the NBA games, which were limited to cable subscribers, these games are part of Apple’s own Friday Night Baseball package and will be available to all Apple TV subscribers with a Vision Pro. (In Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK, and the U.S., anyway.)

As with the NBA games, this will be an immersive-specific telecast with its own announcers (Paul Severino, Xavier Scruggs, Michelle Margaux), replays, and graphics. Apple says that during commercial breaks, viewers will “stay immersed in the in-stadium experience from all angles.”

As always, the details will be fascinating to see. While I thought that the immersive NBA games were pretty good, some viewers complained that there were too many changes in camera angle that broke immersion. Baseball is a very different sport, in terms of pace and in the size of the field, so it’ll be interesting to see how Apple chooses to approach its coverage.

The four immersive games on the schedule are: Red Sox at Yankees (August 28), Angels at Pirates (September 4), Padres at Giants (September 11), and Giants at Dodgers (September 18).

“Ted Lasso” is back on Apple TV, which was no sure thing after the series more or less wrapped up in May of 2023. But it’s back for a fourth season, in which—after an episode-long visit to Ted’s home of Kansas City—the football-turned-soccer coach returns to Richmond, where—as teased at the end of season 3—a new women’s team is launching and just might need a coach.

I’ve seen the first half of the season, and I’m happy to report that though the teams have changed, this is still “Ted Lasso” through and through. Thematically the first three seasons were about Ted’s journey in running away from a dissolving marriage. With season four, a whole new set of themes begin to emerge.

Yes, love ’em or hate ’em Ted’s homespun aphorisms still abound. The relationship between owner Rebecca and marketing genius Keely continues to be as strong as ever. Higgins is still doing his Higgins stuff. Mae is still tending bar. Those three fans in the pub are as random as ever. But in coaching a barely-formed women’s team that is in desperate need of players and fans, “Ted Lasso” returns to its roots as an underdog story, which helps make the whole thing feel more like the show’s first season. (There’s even a press conference scene that is disastrous for entirely different reasons from the original.)

It’s great to have series co-creator Brendan Hunt back as Coach Beard, but the addition of Tanya Reynolds (“Sex Education”) as Alice Chilton introduces a new dynamic. Chilton is the only coach who can go into the locker room without permission, she thinks she deserves the managerial job, and she’s got some serious anger control problems. Reynolds adds a lot of grit to the proceedings, preventing it from becoming too much of a sickeningly sweet reunion love-fest.

The character least served from the season, at least so far as I’ve seen, is breakout character Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein). He’s there and has some moments, but since he’s the manager of the men’s team, he’s often relegated being a gruff, bearded question mark attached to questions about his relationship status with Keeley. I appreciate the ironic turnabout of the men’s manager being an afterthought who’s only relevant in terms of his romantic storylines, but I do wonder if Roy is too strong of a character to be served in such limited doses.

Anyway, the best review I can give to season four of “Ted Lasso” is that each episode made me laugh out loud, a lot. Not only was it nice to see these familiar characters again, but the show did the most important job any comedy has—it’s funny. Welcome back, coach.